Albert Barnes’ Shaken Foundation: Deviating from Founder’s Strict Dictate That His Trove Remain Intact

I guess it was just a matter of time before the Barnes Foundation, once an intimate, inviting setting for enjoying art and nature in bucolic surroundings, took the (once unthinkable) step of making temporary art loans to other institutions—a deviation from the late Albert Barnes’ trust indenture, which set forth specific strictures governing the operation of his eclectic, eccentric treasure trove in the purpose-built, Paul Cret-designed mansion where he had explicitly stipulated that everything should always remain exactly as he left it.

Here’s what the trust indenture says about loans from the collection:

{December 6, 1922} 10. After Donor’s death no picture belonging to the collection shall ever be loaned, sold or otherwise disposed of except that if any picture passes into a state of actual decay so that it no longer is of any value it may be removed for that reason only from the collection.

The donor’s intent couldn’t be clearer. But now, as reported earlier this month by Ted Loos in the NY Times, a Pennsylvania judge has “granted the Barnes’s petition to lend a limited number of storied paintings from its collection galleries to other institutions and to also display them temporarily outside the set configurations established by the obsessive founder, Albert C. Barnes (1872—1951) when he was alive.”

This is yet another stumbling step by the Barnes down the treacherous road of donor-intent deviation, which I critically examined in my 2004 NY Times analysis—Destroying the Museum to Save It.

Originally based in Merion, PA, the interior of the Barnes’ mansion, built in 1925 on the ritzy Main Line of suburban Philadelphia, was controversially cloned in 2012 and transplanted (within a new, postmodern exterior) to the unlovely Benjamin Franklin Parkway in downtown Philadelphia—a city that the eponymous collector famously despised. The architects for the re-do were Tod Williams and Billie Tsien (more recently known for their renovation of the interior of Geffen Hall, home to the NY Philharmonic).

As I lamented in my May 2012 Huffington Post review of the new Barnes—Bogus Barnes Foundation: Fake Galleries, Phony Populism:

The bizarre project (memorialized in a 2004 court decision) to replicate in Philadelphia the galleries of the original 1925 facility in Merion, Pa., flagrantly disregards a primary mission of art institutions to defend the glory of the original against the taint of the spurious. The Barnes once upheld that principle to the point of fanaticism, not even allowing copies of its artworks to be made. Now the institution itself is counterfeit.

In fact, as reported by Peter Crimmins of WHYY, it’s recently been renamed the Frances M. Maguire Art Museum, to house the collection of neighboring Saint Joseph’s University, which is especially strong in “works produced in Latin America from the 17th through the 20th centuries,” according to the school’s website.

The Maguire also houses “full-size plaster and bronze casts gifted or on loan from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.” (That transfer was news to me.) Some of the Met’s extensive cast collection, once neglected, had been restored and loaned, having benefited from “a renaissance of interest among scholars,” who found them “worthy of study, restoration and exhibition,” according to this 1987 NY Times article. Why would the Met loosen its grasp on this long-held educational resource?

The Barnes saga is one of many examples of how museums (particularly, single-collector museums) cannot always be depended upon to uphold donor intent over the long haul, once the founder is gone and competing interests are at play. If the donor’s requirements are unduly restrictive, that issue needs to be addressed before the collection is accepted, not after the collector’s demise.

And in other Barnes news…On Aug. 1, Thom Collins, the current executive director and president of the Barnes, announced the appointment of Maryanne Murphy as the Barnes’s new chief financial officer. She succeeds longtime executive vice president, chief financial officer, and chief operating officer Peg Zminda, whom CultureGrrl readers may remember from this post.

For some historic context, let’s now go back to the May 2012 press opening of the relocated Barnes, via my video of then Barnes president Derek Gillman, architects Billie Tsien & Tod Williams (now of Geffen Hall fame), landscape designer Laurie Olin, and then chief curator Judith Dolkart, as they describe the Philly facility:

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